Ep. 16 - Kelly Carlin

This is synchronicity. - This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. - This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. - This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. - This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. - This is synchronicity. (upbeat music)

Welcome to episode 16 of Synchronicity. My yesterday is Kelly Carlin. I also have a cold, so I'm gonna keep this pretty short. I was up in New York the past few days and had a great time, had some cool guests on the podcast, did some in-person ones, which are great. (clears throat) But I also got a cold up there, so that wasn't so great. So rather than you listen to my sick voice for this typical five, 10 minute intro, I'm just gonna give you the DL, the download on Kelly Carlin. Kelly is the daughter of George Carlin, legendary comedian and counterculture figure, one of my favorite comedians. But more importantly, Kelly is incredibly interesting and smart and wise in her own right, has a degree, got her masters in Jungian Death Psychology, studied at Pacifica, she's a huge Joseph Campbell fan, and more importantly, just really seems to dive in to what the heck are we doing here?

On Earth, what are we doing? She's looking for meaning and more importantly, seems to have a pretty balanced view of the world. She doesn't, she says something in this episode where she says, you know, whenever we too heavily look at something from one side, she's always fundamentally interested in what is being overlooked on the other side. So this equanimity or this balance concept is peppered out throughout this entire discussion. We talk about a bunch of other things to we talk about the concept of the shadow, which is kind of something that in, at least in the new age movement, I think is overlooked quite a bit.

Everyone is kind of into this whole positive thinking, everything is love and light, and yes, everything is love and light, but there's also aspects of ourselves and our culture in the world at large that is dark and not so great. And I think if we overlook those things, we're doing ourselves a tremendous disservice. So we go into that, we talk about Twitter, where I actually met Kelly, talk about spiritual awakenings, the value of intuition. Kelly also mentions this very cool concept of horizontal versus vertical, and how we can make so many connections via this horizontal kind of paradigm, but they don't have a ton of depth to them always.

So she kind of makes this juxtaposition between horizontal and the vertical, very, very cool. I re-listen to that part because it was very interesting. She also mentions Lucinda Williams' new album. I asked her what she's been listening to, she hadn't gotten to it yet, but she's gonna listen to it, "The Ghost of Highway 20." So I have a link on that on the podcast page. As you can tell, I am on cold medicine. I am not my usual jolly self, but this episode is great. So I don't want you to overlook that. Also, the reviews and ratings have been coming in. And I really, these things, they're so nice to read.

I love it. So please, if you haven't given a rating or review on iTunes or Stitcher or whatever you're listening on, I really would appreciate that. So that's awesome if you do that. If not, no biggie, still cool, we're still cool. So yeah, I'm not gonna ram along 'cause my voice can't take it, but without further ado, here is Kelly Carlin. (upbeat music) Thank you, by the way, for doing this. I really appreciate it, and I'm excited to actually have you on for a lot of reasons. So thank you, appreciate it.

My pleasure, I'm always excited to talk to people about the topics that you and I are obsessed with.

Yeah, well, I had, we'll just start, just no real intro here, I'll put an intro before this. One of the things, I had seen you actually pop up. I refer to Twitter as digitized consciousness, and it's like, to me, it's a new form of communication where people don't have that filter that typically goes through their brain, through their mouth, it's circumvented. So now, 'cause you see the same things I must see on Twitter, people bearing their souls sometimes, people losing their minds, just like some, there I admittedly, when I first got on, I was like a early 20s, mid 20s, and I was a single person in New York getting drunk and some of the tweets I put out, I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe it.

(laughing) And I see people still doing it, but one of the first things not having anything to do with drunk and tweets, I saw you come through, I work with Yupiah Zen Center and a long time ago, must not a long time ago, maybe like two years ago, I saw you mention Yupiah, I was like, oh, you were tweeting some really interesting things, and I was like, oh, this is George Carlin's daughter, she seems to be really into this, and so I just started following from afar, and then recently, I don't know exactly how, but I got tuned into you again on Twitter, started following you, and immediately was like, wow, this person is awesome, like this is a great follow, yeah, and then I did a little more research and found out you actually have your master's degree in Jungian depth psychology, and I couldn't be more of a Carl Jung fan, and I don't know if you have this experience, but very rarely do I come across people who are big Carl Jung fans, like most people don't even really know who he is in my world.

True, very true.

So whenever I find someone like, yeah, they kinda know something, so I really, I gotta say, it's just been a pleasure to getting to know you, you know, just digitally, so I'm very excited, so yeah, I'd love to start there, can you, let's assume no one knows anything about Carl Jung, and they know nothing about, you know, anything related to his dreams, stuff, or anything, can you give a brief explanation of, you know, why you got your degree there, and what interested you in the subject?

Yeah, so I've always been a seeker, and was in my 20s, dabbling a lot, in like the more magical thinking aspects of the New Age movement, (laughs) and was a, like, you know, a person who went a lot to the Bodie Tree bookstore, which in L.A. was the spiritual bookstore, it was the place to be. Shirley McLean was like one of my heroes, and so I was always been a seeker, always been looking for like, what is this enlightenment thing, and how do I get out of my misery, and all that kind of stuff? And then lots of life changes in my 30s, got more grounded in all sorts of ways in my life, and then my mom died when I was 34, 1997, and I had like this profound awakening, and part of it was an actual physical experience of an incredible connection to a sense of love and oneness around my mother's death, which was the last thing that I thought I would feel if I could die, because I was really convinced that I was gonna be like, you know, put on major drugs, and maybe put into a rough room at UCLA, and part of that awakening too was like, holy shit, this thing, this love thing is profoundly real, and it's a physical real experience, it's not an idea, it's not an abstract concept of what I'd been reading in books for years, and the other thing about my mother's death was this kind of shit or get off the pot kind of attitude, like, oh, death is real, and people go away, and I wanna be able to sit with death, you know, we didn't handle my mom's death, or her dying very consciously in my family, and part of my yearning had always been to go to a Zen Buddhist retreat, which I just was fascinated by it all, but had like spent maybe five minutes meditating in my life, because I had like anxiety disorder and all this stuff, so I went to a Zen retreat and was intrigued by that, and actually that's when I saw Joan Halifax of--

She's the best.

For the very first time, she was leading this group of people talking about death, and I sat like kind of on the outskirts of this kind of group out under a tree, and wasn't really ready to face it all, but was fascinated by her, oh my God, and she's just this glowing, amazing human, and so anyway, I've always wanted to pursue that, but I also wanted to pursue my art, and so I started to do a one-person show, it didn't work out. Anyway, I knew that I wanted to, a couple of things that had happened to me in those years between my mom's death and going to Pacifica, was that, and Pacifica is where I went to get my master's and study Joseph Campbell Mythology and Carl Jung psychology, and part of it was that I wanted to be able to stand up in front of people and talk about my own life in a way that revealed my humanity and revealed all of our humanity, and I also wanted to be able to understand, like, how did I get here?

How did I get to where I was, because I'd had a very colorful and interesting journey up until that point, which I write about in my memoir, and so I really wanted to understand about the shaping of the human psyche. How do we become who we are? And because of Pacifica had Joseph Campbell's archives on the premises, which for me was like--

That's incredible.

Yeah.

Are you kidding me?

Yeah, it's like my--

Treasure Trove was amazing, man.

It'd be like where I would do my pilgrimage too, you know?

Yeah, it's so awesome.

And then they focus on Carl Jung, and then, and so, and I was intrigued by Carl Jung, I didn't know a lot about him, but I do, you know, one of the things I knew was that he talked about archetypes, and this thing called the shadow. And I had just, you know, after my mother's death, really is when my adulthood started. It's really when I started to kind of grow up in lots of different ways, and try to extricate myself from the emmeshment of my family on a mental level, and physical levels too.

Sure, sure.

And I remember my therapist at during that time, at some point, who had mentioned to me, like, you know, well, that's part of your shadow material. And I was one of those people, which I think there are most of the people on the planet go, "Shadow, what do you mean?"

Right, right.

I'm perfectly lovable and fabulous. They're so part of me.

I mean, I work with, you know, spiritual organizations, and, you know, I am inundated with new age type stuff. I mean, there's a, there's, I don't wanna call an epidemic, but there is this kind of positive thinking movement that I think completely overlooks this critical part of our psyche, which is, I mean, talk about the problems in the world, where they come from. I think a lot of them have to do with people not even knowing that this exists.

Yes, 100%. And so for me, it's like learning about the shadow, and that the shadow, like, I assume the shadow was like, like the darkest, you know, and it is, of course. It can be the darkest parts of ourselves. I mean, the way I love the best description of it that I've ever heard is Robert Bly has an essay about the long bag we drag behind us. And he talks about how at the beginning of life, you know, the first time we're told no, or when you're too big and someone says, you know, calm down, or don't be so big, or don't laugh so hard, or stop running around, or whatever it is, we take that part of ourself, and we put it in a bag, and we say that part is not lovable, and it's not acceptable by society, because that's what our parents are basically doing.

They're trying to make sure that we're gonna get along out there, and that we're gonna be able to survive and succeed, so they know they have to shape us. So we start putting all these parts of ourselves in there. And some of them are the darker things, like our rage, you know, murderous rage, of course. You know, it could be our sexuality, you know, our lust, but it could also be positive aspects of ourselves, our creativity, our liveliness, our joy, you know, whatever it is that we have to kind of shudder away in order to make do in our family. And that becomes our shadow material. And the basic concept that Jung, you know, kind of introduced to the world, well, Freud was the first one.

I mean, the reason it's called depth psychology is because it's about that there is an unconscious person, personal unconscious, and a collective unconscious. And so Freud introduced the concept, and then really Jung is the one who brought the archetypes in, and the importance of the shadow, that it wasn't just all sexual, physical, instinctive things, but that we kind of all share this, many of these archetypes and, you know, that kind of fill up our mythology and our stories, and they all live in the unconscious. And when you're unconsciously in relationship with all of that stuff, it actually runs you more than you're your conscious story does.

And what's crazy, so I became a big fan of Marie-Louis von Franz, who was me and translator, and she wrote an excellent book that I'm still reading because this is not something you can plow through called Psyche and Matter, and it's a fundamental relationship between inner and outer, and how these things manifest, and part of the reason this show is called synchronicity is because at various points in my life, in various, you know, forces, synchronicity has been an omnipresent thing in a lot of different ways, and Jung described it as a very weird way of putting it, but in a causal pattern of orderedness, it's a, you know, and this is partially why I think he's not understood so well, or he's not known, is like if someone picks up a book of his, it is hard to read, like there is no other way to put it, but it is dense, heavy, kind of crazy stuff.

I do love the way that Marie-Louis von Franz, though, she talks about how what happens on the inside actually changes the outside world, and she goes into this in detail in a variety of ways, and to me, that always made a lot of sense 'cause I'd experienced it, and I think if you take enough psychedelics in the right set and setting, you can also experience that, but to me, that was always something that was fascinating, that what we do internally could actually have ramifications outside of the obvious, just like, well, if I'm in a better mood, I'm gonna be nicer to other people and that's gonna create, you know, a nicer situation, which we all kind of understand, but there are things that keep us from that, and the actual changing your internal kind of reaction or way of interacting with the world really does have a substantial impact in a microcosmic and macrocosmic way, which to me is fascinating.

Absolutely, and I, you know, it's really interesting these days with, you know, brain science and neuro research and consciousness research and everything, you know, and how they're trying to, you know, that like, Jung was, you know, he was very intuitive and his writing is hard and dense because he's, you know, he's trying to put words in language to things that no one had ever languaged before, at all, ever, ever. You know, but if you read his memoir--

Yes.

And if you look at the Red Book and kind of look at people talk about the Red Book. Now, and the Red Book was Jung's time in his life, which basically had a psychotic breakdown and used his imagination and what he called active imagination process where he interacted with these inner figures and through drawing and painting and also building, because he built the structure on the coast of this lake he lived on.

Is that cool?

He reorganized himself. I mean, psychotic breakdown means that it's just like, it's pure chaos in there and he reorganized himself and it was through that self reorganization that he discovered all of this insight he had about the psyche and how it works.

Yeah.

And then he tried to translate it into those huge collected works volumes, you know? And then here we are now 100 years later, you know, almost 100 years later, in a post Jungian time where people are still trying to translate it under their stand and even move beyond him too because he was from a very particular time, a very particular culture. He was, you know, in, you know, constant battle with Freud. You know, there's a lot of issues going on there. So it is, it's deep dense stuff. And I think for me, like thank God for Pacifica because being able to enter into some of those concepts and there are some great people who have interpreted his concepts.

June Singer has a book about Jung and all of his concepts where she really lays them out nicely for you. Robert Johnson is another one. Thomas Moore, who's the other guy, James Hollis, a huge fan of James Hollis. He's got these little thin little books that he writes. He's a great interpreter and translator of these concepts.

Yeah, I-- - Yeah, they're so good.

There, to me it is, I've noticed the same thing that I think a lot of people who interact with it. Once you get to the meat or just kind of the concepts of what was going on, the red book is insane. Like I, that is to me, I mean, let alone, like let's just take it from an artistic standpoint, like the guy is brilliant, like this is insane. And it's no doubt that he was tapping into this deep rooted stuff. And that's, we're gonna resonate with that. But the concepts that he kind of touched upon, like you said, we're still unraveling some of these things. But what I love about it is quantum physics, all of these really at the forefront breakthrough of science, they line up with everything that he was saying.

There's no like fundamental split of what was going on in terms of how consciousness interacts with matter and all of these things that seem impossible, but yet are happening and we observe them. It's just like a fact, yeah.

Yeah, and we still don't quite understand it. I mean, I think, you know, we're still trying to find the scientific, I mean, languaging around it. We were just starting to have this conversation, you know, and there's a lot of materialists out there who, you know, want it all, and it may be all brain based, but for me, it's like, it doesn't matter whether it's all brain based or matter based or not. You know, like you said, when you get an insight and shift a perspective inside of you, not only does your experience of the world change, but then your interaction with the world changes, which, like you said, then really does change the world because that's how it works.

That's exactly how it works.

It's through the interaction that we actually make a different experience of things. And, you know, like, yeah, go ahead.

No, no, you go ahead.

Well, and it's really interesting for me because one of the things, like, when I got my masters, I got my masters in counseling psychology, which meant that I could go and become a therapist if I wanted to, and I really knew I didn't want to be a therapist. I really, you know, I tried it for a few years and it was great and interesting, but it's not my path. And I knew that I wanted to be out in the world being able to kind of use this depth psychology filter to look at the greater cultural things that were going on and phenomena that were going on to try to understand them in a deeper way and to try to help people understand like what's going on.

You know, I mean, you just look at politics right now.

'Cause you're clear literally. So I have a list of questions that I'd like to do a little research before I talk to people, just as like, you know, barometers and to check in. So I have a list broken up of cultural questions, personal questions, new men's questions, and you're literally plucking them through. Like I have cycles of news media going culture politics. So yeah, just, you keep going, keep going.

Yeah, and so, and I don't pretend to be an expert or anything, but, and it's been interesting. I mean, the last seven years, I haven't had a lot of chance to do this kind of stuff. I've been kind of on a different journey with my father and my family story and all sorts of things, but I really feel like I've like kind of come out. And I just was at Pacifica two weekends ago and was deepening back into the archetypal psychology perspective with, which is James Hillman. And one of the things we were talking about was how there is, you know, this fascination with the horizontal in our culture, that, you know, especially with the internet.

I mean, the internet is all about web and connection and network, and this is all a big horizontal thing. And then with horizontal, you also get quicker, shallower encounters with people, which is interesting because like you and I found each other because of the horizontal, here we get to have this hour together where we get to go deep, you know, and but just how kind of really obsessed we are with this horizontal aspect. And that as a depth psychologist, I mean, the word is right there and I call myself, you know, the depths are important. And to be able to slow people down to be connected to a moment, to connect to their depths, whether it's their feeling in their body, their somatic experience, their intuition, to get in touch with their unconscious or their imagination, you know, all these things, you know, there's an imbalance and there has been an imbalance in the modern age, obviously, around this stuff.

But you know, it's like, I feel like that's part of my job as a depth psychologist is to come into a conversation. And I mean, it's why I do my solo show and why I wrote my memoir. I mean, it was really great when I was at Pacifica a couple of weekends ago. This woman, Jennifer Selig, she's amazing. She's a archetypal psychologist and she, I got up in front of everyone and I started, I was talking about my passion for the world and how I'm like, you know, how I love to sit in my house and think about my thoughts and all this kind of stuff. But part of me really also wants to go out in the world because I see how the world is suffering and I started to cry and I looked around the room and I said, I really wasn't planning on crying.

And Jennifer said to me, yeah, but you're an extroverted feeler. That's your job is to take us to an emotional place publicly so that we can slow down and actually feel what's going on in our world. So talk about the broader context of this is I look at this. So here's where I think we are culturally as a civilization right now. I think we're caught in the middle of a few interesting paradigms. One is this rapid increase of technology, right? This just insane, you're talking about the horizontal, the connectedness, quick connectedness is just, it's a bell curve is shot to shit. We're going up, you know, exponentially, like I said.

The other thing that I think is happening is I really sense this intuitively and I have for probably going on, you know, over a decade. I am fundamentally sensing at the structure of what rules are archetypal world at large that the paternal structures that have been in place for 2,000 plus years, 2,500 plus years, if not longer, are beginning to break down or have been breaking down and we're finally beginning to see the cracks of kind of this new, not new, but a return to this kind of feminine consciousness, this female consciousness that is slowly starting to creep in and I fundamentally view what's interesting is, I like Buddhism or a concept in Buddhism called the Union and I admittedly do not understand this as well as I probably should to be speaking about, but the union of emptiness and bliss.

And to me, I always looked at it, you know, at least in the Vedic terms of the emptiness is the inherent wisdom that would come from like the father archetype. And the bliss is what is comes out of, you know, what Vedic places would call chakti, right, feminine consciousness, the active, the worldly stuff. And I sense that that's slowly starting to come back into the world. So these things are being spoken about in a more meaningful way by more people. And I've just noticed that over the past 10, 15 years, maybe it's a product of me growing up, but I really sense it's a cultural shift. So I am, I'm trying to figure out, I think it's going to a good place, but also the balancing act between that and these kind of archaic structures that still let's face it rule the Western world, at the very least and starting to rule the rest of the world.

That's kind of the dynamic and interplay that I'd see going on. And I always like to look at just as we have personal, you know, anima and animus and shadow aspects, soda, all structures, systems do. And I really feel like we're at a point, and I think podcasting is part of this and I think just other media outlets. I think we have a real opportunity to shift consciousness in a positive way, not to get people to do things like a certain way, but to just bring more awareness, and or compassion and kindness into things, and still realize like, it's going to be okay. Like if you do that, you're not weak, you're not soft, it's not going to be bad for everyone, but to be more accepting and tolerant of other people's viewpoints is actually like a really good thing to do for not just ourselves, but everyone.

And that's just kind of what I sense is going on. That with this rapid amplification of technology and communication, we also see what you're talking about too, these superficial, very quick, transient moments of reaction that seem to be amplified through this kind of like echo chamber of the internet or social media. So to me, what I'm interested in, this is why I love your approach to this with death psychology is looking it through a lens that can actually kind of frame what everyone is seeing going on, but in a way that can be productive. And I love talking and seeing people like you, 'cause I see your tweets, like I see your political tweets, and you're funny, and everyone should call Ted Cruz what he is, and I think we all do on Twitter, but you have a way of approaching it with a tenderness and kind of like a kindness that isn't lost on me at least.

Someone may see that and just be like, yeah, liberal blah blah, but I can sense the difference between someone who's buying into the news cycle, whatever side they're on, and someone who's like, really, there's a way to look at this that I think is beneficial for everyone, so.

Yeah, and it's hard with 140 characters, but I mean, everything that motivates me is holding the tension of the opposites. Everything, that's completely where I'm motivated from. So, it's awesome.

I got that from your book too, right? I mean, we'll talk about your memoir too. I mean, it's, I really wanna get into that, but that makes sense, psychologically how you grew up.

Yeah, completely, completely, and so for me, it's about always questioning where is, when there's too much focus and energy on one side, what are we leaving out on the shadow side? What's, where's the shadow of it? And there's, it's really about balance for me. Balance is everything, and balance not for the sake of making everything vanilla and wishy-washy and compromising to the point where there's really nothing to stand for, but it's that thing that's created, that third thing that is created when you really, when you do hold the tension of the opposites, there's a third way that is created, and it can only be created when you hold the value of both things equally.

You know, so that when you hold the value of what it means for the conservatism or what you could call the, you know, like the cynics archetype, you know, that which is tradition, and the poo air, which is progress and growth and youth and movement. When you hold both of those things equally, they both have an essential part of the conversation to be had in every moment in our lives, individually and collectively. Same thing with horizontal and vertical. If you get, if you're only in the vertical and the depths, you know, you're gonna get, you're not going anywhere.

You're misconnections with other people.

Yes, not going anywhere. You are staying in one place and you're going up and down your own little--

I love this, I love this.

A little fader, right, right, but you know, but if you're only on the horizontal, then you're never stopping to really check in with what is needed now, you know? And then, you know, like the difference between like this other kind of archetype that's really possessed, which is really about the American dream and capitalism, which is this Titanism, you know, this never-ending sense of power and growth and everything's gotta be bigger.

Yeah, more of it, yeah.

More of it, and you know, and all of that. And that leaves very little room. And it's very heroic, male-heroic type of energy where there's nothing for the feminine in that, you know?

It doesn't allow it, right?

It doesn't allow for the sense of soul, place, quiet, ritual, the body, you know? The culture leaves out the body. I mean, no wonder we're all sick and obese. Well, we don't even, what always blows my mind, and I am guilty of this as much as anyone else, but how we don't really recognize, you know, the father of Western medicine, you know, the Hippocratic of Hippocrates is like, you are what you eat, like what you put in your body, is what you're gonna be and I was like, what do you mean?

Exactly, we all have eating disorders because we're not really feeding ourselves anything. I mean, as a woman, I'm constantly assessing my relationship with food and my body and my looks and all that kind of stuff and really trying to like, find like a new way, a new relationship with all of that because it's like, what, you know, because I am an emotional eater. I've learned how to do at a young age, you know? So yeah, so all of these things though, you know, but if you're only into the soul and that more feminine aspect of body, emotion, soul, all that kind of stuff, you know? Then, you know, you're not going to probably go out and discover the next biggest invention in the world.

Right, it can be a more receptive, you know, more yin part of it, yeah.

Exactly, so this is real interesting, beautiful balance that we need and so I'm always trying to just bring a little balance, a little recognition of, you know, no matter what I see as insanity out there, I try to hold that, well, you know, here's the real cause of it, you know, you can call Ted Cruz or Donald Trump all you really, you know, what you want, but here's the wounding, here's the thing that we're trying to in an unconscious way heal in ourselves or manage or balance in some way in our culture and, you know, and I'm just trying to figure this out as we go along, just like everybody else, you know?

I'm gonna say like, how, what are some, and I don't expect, you don't have to give me like the answer here, but what are some ways that you personally cultivate that perspective or outlook, like I've been meditating this month because Sharon Salzburg's doing this 28 day meditation challenge, which is the only time in my life I meditate four weeks in a row, it's like literally, and I am immersed in this stuff all day long and I have plenty of opportunities to meditate with amazing people, but I don't and I'm trying to figure out why I don't and sometimes I know it has to do with accountability, but that's one of the techniques I do, I do some chanting, I'll take psychedelics once in a while and plunge a little deep and see what I can pull back if anything, but what, I smoke a lot of weed, but what are some things that you do to cultivate this kind of outlook or perspective so you can hold that space in what is admittedly like a very turbulent and kind of like, there's a lot going on in the world out there.

Yeah, well one of the, I mean, and I don't have a proper meditation practice myself, but I do find that when I do meditate 10 to 20 minutes a day for a bunch of days in a row, life goes a lot better, fascinating.

Yeah, we're right, but I don't wanna do it then if we know that's what I'm trying to do.

But that's the thing, I mean, that's the, the why don't we, I mean, that's always the big, and one of the ways I've helped to navigate my, why aren't I doing that or is, and it's why my, it's why my company's called Polymind, and why my name here on Skype is Polymind, is because I really do believe that we are the 10,000 voices and that we are a polymind. We have many perspectives within us and one of the techniques I use, it's kind of an active imagination technique, but it's called voice dialogue. And part of the structure I use it with and really got trained in to do it with a lot of ease and kind of deafness is I work with a gentleman named Gempo Roshi, who created something called the big mind process, which helps you use voice dialogue to walk right into the mind of the Buddha.

And it was really the first time in my life and I got introduced to him through Ken Wilbur and his integral stuff like 10 years ago, when Ken was first putting out all those little five to 10 minute little audio things and the community of integral was becoming an official thing and there was a website and all of that and I really got involved in the integral philosophy and Ken Wilbur's stuff, which I also find is brilliant and really, really visionary and helps kind of put a lot of the pieces together, especially around value systems and Ed versus Blue versus Green and all that kind of stuff. It's really, it's a great way to filter to look at the culture, it's another tool I use, but this voice dialogue thing's amazing.

And Gempo, when you go to work with him like over a weekend, he works with a lot of the ego based voices, the voice of fear, the voice of the controller, the voice of the wounded child, the voice of the voice of anger, the voice of lust, I mean, just all sorts of emotions and different archetypes he works with. And you sit in your seat and he'll ask to speak to, let me speak to the voice of the controller, which is usually the first one he talks to because he knows if he doesn't speak to the voice of the controller. We ain't getting anywhere in this process and it's great and it helps you to like meditation, to learn to see yourself, Kelly, in my case, I would talk about myself in the third person when I'm doing the work, when I'm in another voice, because you start to see that this construct of a personality is just that, it's a construct.

Right, I mean, we know that, right? I mean, I really feel it. Like when you're in the voice of the controller and he'll say, how does the self feel about you as the controller? And you speak as the controller and you're like, well, she doesn't like me at all. I mean, she doesn't like when I try to control her and everything, but she likes me when I try to control other people, you know? And so it's, you really get to see this relationship and so that has helped me a lot to be able to detach from aspects of myself and to look at them from the outside and to step into them and to really hear why are they here?

What do they need?

Well, that is great with the perspective you can get from that, but I mean, 'cause it is, like you're saying, a little bit like meditation where you're watching the discourses of these separate parts of yourself. 'Cause like I, I mean, anyone who's taken psychedelics or done enough meditation, you realize that who we like to think of as ourselves, Noah, Kelly, is just an aggregate of all these big and interlocking things. But I like what this does too, is it gives you a perspective to step into it, which is very, very valuable for just like cultivating different perspectives.

And that's cool.

The reason he created this is because he's been, he's a Zen master and he's been in the Zen world for 40 years, or 50 years. And he saw that there was no work on the shadow, just like Ken Wilbur talks about. There's, and this is what you talked about being in the spiritual communities where it's a lot of positive thinking.

Yeah.

They call it spiritual bypass is what they call it.

Yes, exactly, there you go, exactly.

Yeah. And basically, Gempo said, you know, "We need to own all the shadow parts of ourselves." So what he does is he goes to, you know, he'll talk to these voices that I, Kelly, my personality, like Robert Bly talks about, I put these parts of myself in the basement or in the bag. And I don't want, I don't want them coming and rearing their heads because I have a reputation to uphold. I don't want my murderous rage to show up.

She's not this is right, yeah.

Because I'm a loving, smart, you know, good human being. But when he gives you permission in these sessions to talk to murderous rage, and you find out that murderous rage has been down there since, you know, age two, the first time someone took a toy away from you, right? And you wanted to kill somebody. You start to have a dialogue with this, and it actually, because it's being seen and heard, it starts to become more embodied, more mature, and more included in the conversation. And the energy or the arrows is how young would talk about it. The life force that is held inside of that perspective gets reintegrated into the whole of the personality.

That's the most important part, because I can tell you this. This is something that happened to me last year. I, all of a sudden, I got like a pain in my arm, like a stabbing pain. And I was like, oh, you know, I think I pulled a muscle in my neck. I was doing some lifting. So I went to the doctor. I went to the doctor, and he's like, yeah, you took some X-rays. It looks like you may have like a herniated disc or something, and that's maybe what it is. So he's like, okay, you know, here's Valium for muscle relaxing, and you know, just take some rest, and here's some steroids, and it'll make it better.

Took the steroids for two weeks, took the Valium, never taken Valium before. (coughing) Calm me down. Definitely was like, you know what I actually did, as I watched for two weeks, all of Battlestar Galactica laying down, but I still getting the stabbing, it was great, great show. So I, you know, after two weeks still have the stabbing thing. Basically, it's getting worse at the point where I basically have to lie down, like, you know, like eight hours a day. So two people start recommending me a book, and it's called "The Mind Over Back Pain" was one of them, and it's by this guy, John Sarno. And his--

I think I've heard of this guy, yes.

Yeah, and this was, and at this point, if someone told me, hey, this may be something in your mind, I'd be like, fuck you, you're an asshole.

Yeah, exactly.

How dare you, like, I may be crazy in other ways, but I'm not crazy this way, anyway. So I get the book my dad ends up recommending to us, someone I respect professionally recommends it, someone on Facebook recommends it, so I'm like, okay.

Fine, I'll read it.

So I read it, and the first thing, and I'm more of a Jungian, and I recognize a huge split between Freud and Jung, but the book is very much based on Freudian concepts. One of the most important is this concept of unconscious rage, exactly what you're talking about, exactly to the T, that when you're young, so you get a toy taken away, your mom says you can't have this, your dad says you can't have that, you have this irrational (laughing) you're gonna scream, you're gonna throw a tantrum, as you get older, some people do this in public, I've seen them, but many of us do not choose to engage like that in public, we have to put it somewhere, and we repress it, and we repress it, and we put it down, and we forget about it in the basement.

So the book's basic premise is that there's a part of your brain and mind, and part of this is physiological, and part of it is just a psychic occurrence, that basically, rather than experience that rage, which is so unacceptable to the rational part of your psyche, it is gonna manifest in what people experience as lower back pain, as back pain, as these stabbing pains, and he said, he was a clinical, he had no interest in studying the psychology piano, he was a clinician, and he basically studied 10,000 patients, and came to the idea that what I think this is, is really just a way for us not to experience these things, there's a physiological process that has to do with oxygen deprivation, and the way to kind of result, and that's what you're feeling, this intense pain, 'cause he was saying physiologically like, if you go to a doctor, and they say you have a herniated disc, and your arm is getting tingly, he's like, if you really had something pushing up against a bundle of nerves, you'd lose feeling in that arm, like it wouldn't be off and on, and kind of like weird, like, oh, it happened because of this, and he says, the part of your mind that's consciously aware knows that this is going on, so when you do a funny movement, or you ran too much in a day, it latches onto that as an excuse for you to start experiencing the pain, and he basically talks people through this, through lectures, anyway, I'm reading the book, and one of the techniques is, you know, when you experience the pain psychologically, start thinking about things that may be related to, list your stressors down on a piece of paper, take five to 10 minutes of contemplation to either think of it, or just what could be going on.

So I'm reading this book, and I've been basically laid out for almost two months now, and I was going through a lot, or like, stressful work stuff, I mean, there couldn't have been more obvious why it might be experiencing unconscious rage. I start reading the book, and there comes a point in the book where he goes, for a very small percentage of people, once their conscious mind kind of latches onto this concept, the pain will start to move around the body, and sure enough, as I'm reading this, the pain starts like shooting to my right side of my body, to my neck, to my back, all over the place, I'm like, holy fucking shit.

I'm like, this is the scariest thing ever, and this, and long story short, I, once in a while, we'll get a little twinge somewhere, and I'll kind of know what it is. His broader theory, and this is why I think it's cool, is he thinks that almost all immune diseases, cancers, things like that, he's not making this claim exactly, but he's basically saying, this stuff, all of these illnesses that we experience, yes, they can be physiologically brought on by what we eat and what we do, but this stuff is also repressed emotions, there's stuff in our psyche that this is the psyche and matter thing, it influences our physical structure, and so when we have something like what you're talking about,

How could it not?

How could it not, right, but like, we know that like, I'm a Mr. Mind Over Matter guy, I believe you can manifest things, if you do it in the right way with the right intention, but when I was getting this pain, what did I do exactly, immediately went to the doctor, and I was like, I need a valium and steroids, so it's one of these things that I think the more we kind of have techniques for dealing with those types of things in our psyche, and in our world, the more we discuss them, and more we kind of just get it out there, maybe we can start shifting some of the paradigms that exist with these things.

So I wanna, yeah.

Yeah, well, and just briefly to sum up too, like, you know, ultimately, mind, body, there is no difference, it's just two different experiences of the same thing, you know, it probably is chemicals and peptides and energy and all those kind of stuff, and the thing about doing the process, whatever kind of process you end up doing around this stuff, is that by learning to language it and finding words to express it, is moves it beyond the body then, it becomes logos, it becomes a thing that is concretized and then can be understood in that way, but you know, sometimes it's not words though, but sometimes it's movement or dance or painting, I mean, any kind of, yes, any kind of active imagination process where you can just express, you know, and sometimes it's nonverbal, but if you can get it to words, that's great too, but sometimes like Marion Woodman's work is very nonverbal, it's all movement, mask making, you know, myth storytelling in the sense that it's words, but it's more about the metaphor and the archetypes and things like that.

And, you know, so it's, you know, it's about recognizing that there's many ways in and many ways to release, you know, and it's about experimenting and finding the way that kind of really can work in your day for you.

That to me is, I mean, that's my endless pursuit so far of my life is figuring out exactly how to language it or put it away. So I wanted to shift with that as a segue.

Sure. - Talk about the process of writing your autobiography here, you know, Carlin Home Companion for People Don't Know, you wrote an incredible book. I'm about halfway through it. Really, I mean, talk about soul bearing. I mean, this is great. I love reading stuff like this because you can see like everything on the paper that was going on in your life and what was that process like? You don't have to go into specifics of, you know, what exactly you were doing, but what is the process like from like a soul level or just like from a consciousness level writing something like that? 'Cause I'm sure a lot of people have thought like, "Hey, I'm gonna write a book, it's gonna be interesting,"

but you did it and I'm sure it was an experience. So I'd love to hear about it.

Yeah, it's ultimately been a 15 year experience because 15 years ago is when I wrote my first solo show and wanted to share these stories with the world. Mostly because I was a survivor of a lot of interesting things and a lot of ordinary universal things too. Parents who were struggled with addiction, abusive relationships, finding lost as an artist in a world that wants you to be corporate. Also just having panic attack disorder and if we're coming that, having a parent die, now two parents, but you know, just a lot of kind of universal things. So I had survived a lot of things and I wanted to talk about that.

This is part of my extroverted feeler thing that I understand now. And part of what inspired me originally to even want to do an art form like this was a gentleman named Spalding Gray who was a storyteller and he did a great show called Swimming to Cambodia which ended up being a film of him storytelling directed by Jonathan Demi. Another one called Monster in a Box about him trying to write a screenplay. And this is a man who went on stage and just poured out his soul on stage. His neurosis, his insanity, his crazy thoughts but he was very funny and he was a great storyteller and it made me feel less alone in the world when I saw him.

I saw him in my late 20s and it changed everything for me. Very, very, very different than what my dad did on stage. I look at my dad and my dad is definitely more of a thinking type and lives from his head exclusively. And they say you live out the shadow of your parents so it's no wonder that I'm the feeler type and that I want to talk about everything that goes on inside of me in my life whereas my dad wants to talk about great ideas and relate them all to the world outside. Even though they were at the experiences that sometimes he had, he was much more talking about the world out there. So that's part of it.

And then I did a lot of dancing around telling my stories in a bigger form and really had to wait for my dad to be no longer here for me to feel like I had the full freedom to do it because of the nature of who he was and it just made him feel uncomfortable which you'll get to in that part of the book if you haven't yet. But the actual writing of it and finally getting to share it publicly has been, well the writing was great. I love writing, I love sitting in my house. It's the introverted part of me. I'm pretty much exactly half extrovert, half introvert on my Myers-Briggs. So I need a little of both in my life and I loved being in my house and just writing.

I love the creative process. I love solving the creative problem. I know what I wanted to, I can feel it in my body semantically before I get it out there, you know. And like I'm working on a speech right now and I can feel where I want the ending to go now. And I worked on it for about 45 minutes today and I knew I just got to let it cook a little more. I got to walk away from it. So when I come tomorrow, it'll be fresh again. And just I love that process finding the right word, the right phrase, the right way to bring something together to bring people along. Which I know I got from my dad, watching my dad my whole life on stage, you know.

He really trained me and how to bring people along to a logical conclusion that they weren't expecting to go. And he did it purely for the sake of humor. But because of the topics he worked on, he was also changing minds and really shifting people's consciousness on big, big. Yeah, to this day, to this day. Tell you how many times I'll see it just from, you know, people I admire and respect. And the first person ever turned me on to George Carlin was my grandma and she was just like, "You got to see this." Oh, that is awesome. Yeah, she was the coolest. And I was just like blown away from the cultural things.

Like one of my favorite things your dad said was, you know, when everyone's talking about, you know, are we going to be here? He's like, the earth is going to be fine. Like whatever we do to it, it doesn't matter. It's a self-correcting organism. We may be fucked and I love that. It's just so genius, yeah. And the environmentalist hated him for that because, you know, he was saying, yeah, you can recycle, but, you know, think about what the earth has been through. You know, she'll figure out what to do with plastic. You know, she'll figure it out. And then of course, the climate deniers now grab on to him and say, see, he didn't leave it.

I'm like, no, dudes, don't you understand? He was still completely against industry and pollution. I mean, come on, don't be a fucking idiot. It's just so funny, but so anyway, and then now having it done, I mean, think about it. It's a 15 years I've been wanting to tell the story. Seven years ago, my dad died. I've been, I stepped into doing a solo show about this material with Paul Provenza as my director. That's been an incredible experience. And now that it's out there, it's been out for October and November, December, January, five months, which is kind of mind boggling to me that it's been five months, that it's, I'm excited because I feel like who I was after leaving Pacifica in 2004, and I'd spent about four years after that, two of them being a therapist, and then two really kind of stepping into the coaching world and the leadership training world, and really part of it to just be able to see what was outside of the psychological clinical aspect, because working clinically with people is a very specific thing, especially if you're a Jungian.

And you're working with people with very deep suffering and stuff, and I wanted to learn, once again, balanced tension of the opposites. I wanted to learn techniques where I didn't have to just always be about holding the safe space for someone. I also wanted to learn how to kick people in the ass.

Which is super, I have learned this lesson more in the past two years of my life than I think I, everything else combined. That's such a, you know, I've been two guests ago. By the time this one comes out, David Nickton, Buddhist teacher, I interviewed, and we were talking about, you know, he studied with the Cho Geom Trungpa. One of my favorite things that Cho Geom Trungpa talks about is idiot compassion, where you're basically, you know, and this is a long line of the spiritual pie bass stuff, like you don't want to be a dummy. There's a way to be compassionate and firm. There's a way, and that is very important for people to remember, because it's balancing, just like--

And that's the greatness, I think, of the great Buddhist teachers, and especially the Zen masters, is, you know, there's an ass kicking that goes on that's essential for your own enlightenment. And so those two years that I did that, I encountered some great teachers in that world that really kicked me out of my slumber in some ways, for me to really step into, you know, kind of the big thing I'm here to do on the planet, you know, and to own that energy, which is a terrifying energy for someone who, A, grew up in the shadow of someone who was doing great things on the planet, and who, you know, I've always been taught to be humble and not arrogant, but there's a certain moment where you have to kind of own something in yourself.

You have to own your vision and your power and your gifts and know that if you don't use them, you know, that's the sin of your life, it is, it's a waste, it's a waste. It is, and that-- - The concept of individuation or actualizing, like you get that's--

Yes.

Well, that's what kind of, I didn't want to, you know, I don't want to ask a big question, like, what's the meaning of life, but that's kind of where I go with it. I mean, outside of everyone's personal journey and what their specific path is, is, I mean, I've come to the conclusion, at least in my life, that my particular skills and talents, whatever they be in any area, I like to help people. And whatever that is, whether it's telling people, we're helping people feel better, whether it's showing someone teaching something, whatever is going to be the best synthesis of that is what I tend to like to do.

Yeah, and that the key is with that, which is something I need to get talked about at the beginning here, which is also, you can't be attached to the outcome though.

No, though, do not be attached to the fruits of your labor. That's good. - And even the outcome, are we going to save the planet?

Right, right.

I mean, that's the terrifying one to really let go of because, you know, I mean, I, you know, when I was first introduced to Integral and all this kind of stuff and even, you know, being a therapist and everything, it's like, let's heal the world, let's fix the world. Let's, you know, how do I get people to jump from, you know, kind of orange, materialist capital to green community and then to Integral, you know? And Don Beck, who like teaches all this stuff, looked at me and he said, why are you trying to make anything happen? Like, well, that's not your job. And I'm like, but it is. I have to make consciousness change.

And he's like, wow, that sounds really exhausting.

Yes.

And so, and that's, and so once again, the tension of those particular opposites is, so in one hand, you have to hold, I'm here to change the world and we can do it. And on the other hand, you have to hold, I can't change anything.

That's right.

And when you hold both of those things at the same time and honor the truth and the value of both of them and the importance of them, something a third way is created, where you are engaged, but detached, you are loving and full of love and connected and fully on board. And at the same time, know that none of it is ultimately under our personal purm view or ego strength or any of that. And that part of it is being both, being attached and unattached.

And I've found the grasping and aversion concept, right? That's essentially what it is, the middle way. That's what Buddha teaches there. I've noticed paradoxically, when you can actually maintain that, the state of flow, the Dow, whatever you wanna call it, things tend to kind of manifest and maybe what your intentions start to align with the outcome. And I have noticed the other thing, do not be attached to the fruits of your labor. That's incredibly important. But I like as an antidote to that gratitude. That's usually how I--

Beautiful, beautiful. - It's a nice little trick I picked up. You can make everything good if you're just grateful for it. It's a little tricky trick.

Yeah, yeah, and in the end, I've had a few glimpses of this in working with Gempo Roshi where we get a chance to understand and have that enormous sense of enlightenment and being connected to the Buddha nature and transcendence and oneness. And seeing everything as that. And then at the same time, living in an ordinary life and that you have to get up and you have to brush your teeth and I have to wash my hair again today and all of that. And really seeing, I've had a few glimpses of it where there really is no difference between the two.

Oh, not at all. The sacred is in the mundane.

Well, okay, I wanna-- - Yeah, and it's a concept that all of us can agree on, but to really fucking do it. To really feel it and be in it is an extraordinary moment. And like I said, I've had a few glimpses. I get lucky every once in a while and the glimpse comes around again. And I try not to grasp at it, but to really get that, all this seeking is for not because it's all really is. This is it, folks.

That's really-- - This is it.

I'm hoping we all can become more aware of that as time goes on collectively. So I wanna end just with a couple of little, this has been so much fun. - Yes.

By the way-- - This has been great.

Absolutely, great. - Just to end it to tip, to bring it back into the, quote unquote, real world, are you reading or listening to any music right now or recently that you would like to let the listeners know about that I can put some linkies to?

I haven't fully deepened into it, but Lucinda Williams has a new album out.

Yeah, I don't know. - And big fan of hers gotten a chance to hang out with her a little bit before. So that's gonna be my thing that I'm gonna deepen into probably this week. So that's what I'm into. Like literally this morning I was on Facebook, there's a blog that she's writing, Tom, her husband's writing about each track about the process of making the track and what it means to Lucinda. So check that out on Facebook to go to Lucinda's public page and you'll see that's blogs. Yeah. - Cool. All right, Kelly, thank you so much for doing this.

My pleasure, this was great fun.

Yeah, it was awesome.

So then. (upbeat music) In music though, one doesn't make the end of a competition. (mumbles) If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only phenomenal. People go to concert, just the one crackling chord 'cause that's the end. (laughs) Say, "We're dancing." You don't aim at a particular spot in the room. That's where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance. Now, but we don't see that as something brought by our education into our everyday content. We start a system of schooling that gives a big deal about your pleasure.

It's all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system where they kind of come on. (mumbles) And yeah, you're going to kindergarten. That's a great thing because when you finish that, you'll get to the first grade. And then come on, the first grade needs the second grade and so on. And then you get out of grade school, you've got high school and it's revving up and thing is coming. Then you're going to go to college, buy a job and you get into graduate school. And when you're through with graduate school, you go out and join the world. And then you get into some racket where you're selling insurance.

And they've got that quoted. And you're going to make that. And all the time, the thing is coming. It's coming, it's coming. That great thing, the success you're working on. And then when you wake up one day around 40 years old, you say, "My God, I've arrived, I've arrived, I'm there." And you don't feel very different than what you always felt. And there's a slight letdown because you feel as a hoax. And there was a hoax, a dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything. By expectation, look at the people who live to retire and put those savings.

Put those savings, the savings.

Then when they 65, they don't have any energy left, they're more or less impotent. And they go with government and other people. Senior citizens can make it. (laughing) And because we simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage. We tried a serious purpose at the end. The thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is or maybe even after you're dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and it was supposed to sing or dance. Well, the music was being played. When business depends on trucks, the Hudson Valley depends on Healy Brothers.

With six dedicated commercial service centers and sales locations across the Hudson Valley, Healy Brothers offers the strength, scale, and capability commercial buyers demand because work doesn't wait. With mobile service available when and where it counts, Hudson Valley turns to Healy Brothers. Visit anyone of Healy's six commercial vehicle centers in Middletown, Goshen, Beacon, Newburg, and Poughkeepsie or shop us online at healycommercial.com. Healy Brothers, driven by excellence for more than 45 years.